For example: Seagate Barracuda 7.7200 40Gb. When scan it by MHDD almost all surface looks perfect, but drive have 1 bad block (or little bit more) in first sectors. How to fix the problem?
First rule: if data is important you must save it first, before do any “repair” or you can lose you data in this drive at any moment.
Now, then data saved we can start drive diagnostic. If drive have few bad blocks we can divide situation to the following case:
Universal:
1) software damaged – this is actually not damage, but sectors with incorrect ECC info, simply rewrite sectors to remove trouble.(MHDD erase waits will help)
2) actual damaged – well sometimes surface can be worn and we have actual damage. If we have not very much damage that we can try remap them. Try simple rewrite bad sector (most drives perform remap on write) or use MHDD remap on etc. (then bad sector remapped SMART Reallocated sector count attribute increased )
Seagate 7.7200:
3) head problem – drive firmware detect head problem and switch to “read only” mode. This can be diagnosed by following symptoms:
①. after drive power on, it take long time to become ready (BSY status cleared)
②. drive don’t write if you run MHDD “erase” (not fast erase, but normal erase) everything stopped after MHDD write 765 sectors. (Really nothing wrote at all, if you try writing disk sectors with disk editor, you see what nothing changed)
Such troubles most likely can’t be fixed by MHDD, because they caused by bad head. You should use the head replace tools to fix this problem.